Model Behavior: A Novel [9780063465770]

Overview

A blazingly original debut novel from celebrated ghostwriter and music journalist Aliya S. King, Model Behavior: As Told To . . . is a wickedly funny, deeply felt story about a woman who has spent her career writing other people's stories, finally forced to reckon with her own. Think Queenie meets Daisy Jones & The Six.

Aliya S. King has spent three decades as one of the most sought-after ghostwriters and music journalists in the industry, with credits that span the highest levels of hip-hop, R&B, and celebrity culture, but most of them have been invisible by design. Model Behavior is her debut novel, and it could only have been written by her. Protagonist Dove Delaney-Carter is a ghostwriter with eleven New York Times bestsellers to her name and zero public credit for any of them. She has perfected the art of disappearing into other people's stories, and she has very good reasons for staying hidden. When her agent strong-arms her into a meeting with Marni Marie Martineau , Ghanaian-born supermodel, media mogul, global icon, and one of the most private women alive, Dove intends to say no, refer her to someone else, and be home in time for dinner. She is not expecting Marni to already know everything about her.

What follows is a novel that operates on multiple levels at once and does so with rare confidence. On its surface, Model Behavior is the story of a year-long collaboration between two extraordinary Black women on opposite ends of the fame spectrum as they excavate the secrets Marni has spent a lifetime protecting: a forced abortion, a sex trafficking ordeal, decades of violence laundered through tabloid gossip and powerful men who were never held accountable. But running underneath that story is another one entirely: Dove's own. Her mother's suicide. Her relapse. A surprise pregnancy at forty-four. A marriage straining under the weight of a woman who has spent her whole career listening and almost none of it being heard. King draws on her own intimate knowledge of the celebrity world, the ghostwriting industry, and the specific labor of being a Black woman who makes other people's stories legible, to write a novel that is also unavoidably and thrillingly about the cost of that labor.

Model Behavior is a book about authorship in its deepest sense: who gets to tell a story, whose voice gets captured and whose gets erased, and what it means to spend a life writing in the margins of someone else's narrative. It is also, in the best tradition of debut novels that arrive fully formed, a book that announces its author. Aliya S. King has spent thirty years making other people's words sing. This one is hers.